The artist Alex Da Corte’s elaborate installations are often carnivalesque, filled with strange sculptural objects (motorized plastic swans, an enormous box of Kleenex, a cat-shaped neon sign) and otherworldly environments. That makes Vienna Secession — one of the classic white cube galleries in Europe, where Da Corte is currently the subject of a solo show — a rather unexpected place to encounter his work. But, true to form, the artist has transformed the space into a kind of alien disco replete with velvet walls, multicolored carpets, clusters of bright lights and strange scattered objects: a toy chicken atop a plastic tube, an open umbrella, a bench made of a broomstick and a pink neon light.

The centerpiece of the show is a new video called “Slow Graffiti,” a more or less shot-for-shot remake of the 1967 short film “The Perfect Human” by Jorgen Leth, the Danish director known for his film of Andy Warhol eating a hamburger from Burger King. “The Perfect Human” has the detached tone of a scientific experiment. It follows a man and a woman as they perform banal tasks, such as clipping their fingernails and eating dinner, in an empty, featureless white room, with voice-over narration that treats its subjects like animals in a nature documentary. “Here is the perfect human. We will see the perfect human functioning ... How does such a number function? What kind of thing is it? We will look into that.”

Da Corte’s interpretation appears less icy — his colorful modifications to Leth’s white room echo the look the interior of his reinterpretation of the gallery space at Secession. In an especially surreal twist, Da Corte plays both parts, man and woman, dressed as Frankenstein’s monster, in glam-rock platform boots, and performing the simple tasks of “The Perfect Human” with grotesque updates. At one point in Leth’s film, the male actor scratches the back of his neck. This shot is replicated in Da Corte’s film, except that instead of merely rubbing his skin, Da Corte slaps a piece of deli meat and a slice of Swiss cheese to the back of his neck and secures it with a flap from his monster mask.

Da Corte’s also diverges from the original in his voice-over script, which was written by his friend, the painter Sam McKinniss. But the narration maintains a calculatedly dispassionate mood, describing the monster as “a man at night making a pathetic attempt at connection — to connect with anyone in an empty room.” The backdrop of this bit of narration is Da Corte, still dressed as Frankenstein’s creature, dancing sheepishly while spraying two cans of spray paint into the air.

If Leth’s film feels like a kind of clinical exploration of a human being’s basic functions, Da Corte refocuses the story on being an artist in particular. What better description of the creative process than a person in an empty room trying to connect with someone — anyone? Of course, being a human and being an artist are in many ways continuous, and tellingly, both films end the same way, with a man at a table, looking into the camera with great melancholy and saying, “Today, too, I experienced something I hope to understand in a few days.”